Harness the change

John Fayhee’s piece (HCN, 3/20/06: Town
Shopping) raises a lot of the usual questions, but one he avoided
is this: Are those of us who bemoan the gentrification of the West
guilty of romanticizing poverty? An acquaintance in Santa Fe once
commented that the area around Taos was "Cabrini Green with better
scenery" — that is, a dangerous, depressed, drug-dominated
locale where you wouldn’t want to live. Beautiful, though.

Let’s face it: The scenic West is the resource
colony West, the economically undeveloped West, the West that
offers its residents few choices and little redress. I’m
guiltier than most when it comes to fighting for the way things
were, but I am coming to see that the influx of new people, and new
money, brings with it demand for change that isn’t all bad.

New residents are often outspoken opponents of the old
ways of mining a place into oblivion, logging it down to dirt, or
grazing it to dust. This isn’t to say that everyone who lived
in some Western Shangri-la before people like me arrived wants
their place despoiled, only that people who depend on commodity
resource production rarely have the economic or political power to
effect meaningful change. Outsiders, perhaps, do.

Fayhee’s right; I cheerfully concede my own hypocrisy (I wish
more people would). I humbly suggest, though, that Westerners
consider the situation Fayhee describes through a different lens.
Rather than trying to find the past and move there, understand that
change is coming and decide how to harness it to the best ends.
What the "best ends" are and how to harness change —
that’s where it gets interesting.